Countries need to evaluate both costs and benefits when mandating mobility restrictions for their population. This paper studies one edge of this debate. Namely, to what extent mobility reductions and confinement measures impact Value Added Tax (VAT) collection, which is an increasingly...

In theory, resources should be allocated to the best projects. But empirical challenges have forced researchers to focus their flashlights on measuring cost-of-capital, hurdle rates, or implications of projects. Thus, they usually leave the ex-ante process of project preparation and appraisal as...

Firms in global surveys often state that access to finance is their primary obstacle to growth. However, merely stating that access to finance is an obstacle does not necessarily imply the firm is financially constrained. We examine the idea that firms facing external finance constraints should...

A recent literature emphasizes the prominence of dominant currencies in international trade invoicing, and the role of invoice currencies in the transmission of exchange rate shocks. In this paper, we examine the introduction of the euro as a once-in-a-century natural experiment which induced a...

The threat of short-term supply disruptions may matter for commodity prices, although their magnitude is hard to detect, for example, due to anticipation, storage and the relatively short duration of strikes. This article uses a century of labor strikes in Chile copper mines (1910-2010) to...

In global surveys, firms tend to state that access to finance is their main obstacle to operate or grow. But complaining about finance does not necessarily imply the firm is financially constrained. We exploit the idea that firms facing external finance constraints should reinvest more heavily...